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We know from Blake's Notebook and other manuscripts that he was an extensive reviser and rearranger of his verses before he considered them ready for publication. But once he had made a fair copy in acid-resistant varnish or ground, to be applied in reverse to the copper plate, he was able to make only minor changes.[7] Some examples of mending in the varnish are the redrawings of lower-case letters as capitals on Plates 10, 21, 24, 61, 83, and 85. The correction of "furnaes" to "furnaces" and of "garents" to "garments" on Plates 53 and 61 must have been made after transfer to copper and also after some etching had been done: the inserted letters and carets are very faint when Blake forgets to retouch them after printing; if they had been added at once, they should have been as dark as the original lettering.

Before etching, or after only shallow etching, Blake could easily remove whole lines and replace them with birds or flames or tendrils drawn in varnish directly on the copper. We can hardly recover such deletions, but we can suspect their having existed, because Blake's normal paragraph spacing does not leave the exact height of a line as do some of the bird-filled hiatuses, and because there is usually some slight indention of the first line of a genuine paragraph. By the same token, we are able to detect, from signs of crowding, the late insertion

of a line within a stanza break (see Plates 39 and 53). But such insertions could only be made before the acid had been applied for any length of time.

When Blake called his etched or etched and engraved plates "types" or "stereotypes" he was expressing the fact that once finished his copper plates were monolithic. The illustrations could be modified by further etching (see Plate 95) or engraving, but the text was almost unalterable. Once in a while, when there was room, he could add a line above or below the block of text, by engraving. And we have seen that he could scratch out words or lines whenever he felt the need to. But it was almost impossible for him to put new words in the place of old. The complicated mending process involved in transforming one fourletter adjective into another on Plate 37 is a formidable illustration of the limits imposed on the blacksmith-poet by the nature of his medium.